How we’re preparing for the next era of AI
Zoom’s CTO, Xuedong Huang, discusses how small language models (SLMs) drive our vision for AI agents to work together in a federated approach to improve your day-to-day tasks.
Updated on July 22, 2024
Published on December 20, 2023
More and more, organizations understand AI as an imperative technology for employees, as opposed to a nice-to-have. As an IT leader, you’re at the forefront of this wave of digital transformation, tasked with bringing the right technology to help employees collaborate and communicate effectively.
With so many AI solutions available, your team might be overwhelmed with evaluating and testing different tools based on various factors, including cost, quality, integrations, and security and privacy. Finding a trusted and effective solution takes time. But moving too slowly can come with its own pitfalls. If eager employees aren’t provided with approved AI tools, they might start using unvetted apps for their work, and you won’t know how company data is being handled or whether it’s being used to train third-party AI models. And they won’t gain the productivity gains that AI can provide.
You may be also juggling how to incorporate AI into your existing workflows, onboard users, and communicate the value of AI so employees use it.
Enter Zoom AI Companion 2.0, your smart AI assistant. It’s part of the Zoom Workplace platform you trust, and the collaboration experience your employees already know and love — an easy way to summarize meetings and chat threads, compose messages in Team Chat and email, and brainstorm and organize ideas on a whiteboard or a Zoom Doc. Because it’s included at no additional cost for paid users on eligible Zoom plans,* you don’t need to worry about fitting a new tool into your budget.
Whether you’re actively considering AI Companion or looking for guidance on implementing it effectively, we’ve outlined the information you need below. If you’re new to AI Companion 2.0, learn what it can do for your team.
Rigorous evaluation of any application is essential to help keep company data secure and reduce potential risks. Zoom’s strong culture of care, which prioritizes security and privacy at the center of its products, is a key factor in our commitment to responsible AI. If your organization already uses Zoom, you’re likely familiar with how we prioritize security, privacy, and compliance across the Zoom Workplace platform.
Most importantly, Zoom does not use any of our customers’ audio, video, chat, screen sharing, attachments, or other communications, such as customer content (such as poll results, whiteboard, and reactions), to train Zoom’s or our third-party artificial intelligence models.
If you’re not familiar with Zoom’s security and privacy practices, our AI Companion Security and Privacy White Paper provides a detailed look at our product features and approach to responsible AI, answering many questions you may have while evaluating our AI solutions.
For information on:
Administrators may enable or disable features for their entire account within the account settings page in the Admin Portal. You can choose whether to provide all employees or just certain groups with access to any or all of these features (requires version 6.2.5 and above.
It’s not an all-or-nothing choice — for instance, you may want employees to be able to summarize meetings with AI Companion but wait to roll out certain features to employees like email or Team Chat compose while you complete more testing. You can easily switch access on or off in your account settings.
Click on the AI Companion tab, and you’ll see the ability to toggle each available feature on or off at the account level.
To get even more granular, you can control employee access to AI Companion features at the account, group, and user levels.
Here’s what that looks like, using meeting summary as an example, though this applies to other AI Companion features as well:
To restrict settings at the account and group levels, click the lock icon to prevent users from changing them. For instance, you can require that all meeting summaries be sent to only the meeting host.
After you toggle a feature on, you have even more options to control how AI Companion’s outputs are shared and accessed. For instance, when you turn on meeting summaries, you can decide who gets those meeting summaries: only the host, the host and internal attendees, or share summaries with all meeting invitees, including those outside your company.
At the user level, employees can choose how they want to use AI Companion in meetings they host. They can enable AI Companion to automatically start a meeting summary for every meeting they host or choose to start the summary manually. Hosts can also decide whether to allow attendees to ask AI Companion questions about the meetings they host. Hosts can turn these features on and off during a meeting.
During a meeting, all attendees will be notified when AI Companion features are turned on. When AI Companion features are active in a meeting, a white AI Companion icon appears at the top right corner of the meeting window. For an example, see the image above.
Before you roll out AI Companion across your entire organization, you might want to run a pilot test with a select group of employees. This allows you to test the capabilities and gather feedback and learnings from a smaller user base first. With our granular controls for AI Companion, it’s easy to do that.
If you want, you can assign separate admins to your test group — they won’t have full admin account access, but they will be able to add and manage members in your test group. This is perfect if you want to delegate someone to manage the pilot, even if they aren’t an account admin.
Employee communication is critical when rolling out any technology. After all, if employees aren’t informed about what’s available, bought in about how it can help them, and comfortable using it, they probably won’t adopt it.
Here are some ways AI Companion can help you be more efficient in your work:
If you want help introducing AI Companion to your organization, go to the AI Companion Onboarding Center to find user guides, templates, best practices, demo videos, and more.
Here’s an example template email for introducing AI Companion to your team. Before you send it, make sure you edit it to reflect which AI Companion features you choose or which Zoom products you’re licensed for:
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Dear [employees],
We’re excited to announce that AI Companion, Zoom’s generative AI assistant, is now available for you to use on Zoom.
AI Companion has a number of capabilities designed to help you throughout your workday to help enhance productivity and collaboration. It can:
Here are some common questions you might have:
Can I choose whether to use AI Companion?
You have control over which AI Companion capabilities you want to use in meetings you host. You can turn these capabilities on or off at any time, and you can choose whether or not to use them in your meetings on a case-by-case basis. You can also choose when to turn AI Companion on or off while your meeting is in progress. The AI Companion diamond will be visible in the top-right corner of your window if AI Companion is active during a meeting. If you join a meeting where AI Companion capabilities are being used, you’ll be notified with a disclaimer.
Will my meeting conversations be used to train AI models?
Zoom does not use any customer audio, video, chat, screen sharing, attachments, or other communications-like customer content (such as poll results, whiteboard, and reactions) to train Zoom’s or its third-party artificial intelligence models.
How do I get started?
Look for the AI Companion diamond while you’re using Zoom—in your Meetings toolbar, Team Chat, Mail, or Zoom Whiteboard.
If you have questions or concerns, contact us at [COMPANY][DEPARTMENT].
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After you’ve introduced AI Companion, follow these tips to drive adoption and help your employees learn how to use it effectively:
Employees learn and engage in different ways, and we have a variety of AI Companion resources available that you can share with them.
Ready to get started with AI Companion? Here are a few important links:
Editor’s note: This blog post was edited on November 5, 2024 to include the most up-to-date information on Zoom AI Companion.